Stop Surrogacy Now Launches

We are Part of A Worldwide Coalition to End Surrogacy and the Exploitation of Women and Children

San Francisco, CA/May 11, 2015 — Stop Surrogacy Now launches today. Stop Surrogacy Now brings together a worldwide, ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse group opposed to the exploitation of women and the human trafficking of children through surrogacy.

With support from 16 organizations and more than 100 individuals from 18 countries, Stop Surrogacy Now demands recognition that surrogacy exploits women (in many cases poor and marginalized) who are paid to bear children. Often these women are subject to coercion, restrictive or substandard living conditions, and poor health care. In addition, surrogacy carries many severe, short- and long-term health risks. Many surrogates live as indentured persons with 24 hour monitoring of the “property” within their wombs.

Stop Surrogacy Now demands recognition that children conceived for surrogacy are quality-controlled: subject to sex-selection or abandonment for disability or simple change-of-mind. Children produced through surrogacy are objects of contract as well as products of inequitable bargaining power and unregulated markets. Most often, these commercially produced children experience the sudden and complete severance of the natural bond between mother and child and are intentionally deprived of contact with and knowledge of one or both biological parents in direct violation of the U.N.’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

Signatories to Stop Surrogacy Now demand a complete stop to surrogacy in order to protect women and children worldwide and to end efforts that would seek to legitimize and normalize trafficking children.

“A woman is a human being not a machine, states Shagufta Omar, President, Pakistan Chapter of the International Muslim Women Union. She continues, “Disconnecting both mother and the child from each other is the violation of the human rights of both.”

“There is no right to a child and rich people must be stopped from using a woman as a living incubator and then taking their baby away and showing it off as their own. We must prevent this reproductive slavery and stop it now”, says Dr. Renate Klein, long-time health activist and FINRRAGE (Australia) co-ordinator.

Among the 16 organizations joining the Stop Surrogacy Now campaign is CoRP, a French NGO that promotes human rights and the abolition of surrogacy as being in contradiction to international conventions such as Article 21 of the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, the so-called Oviedo Convention, which stipulates, “The human body and its parts shall not, as such, give rise to financial gain.”

Dr. Mia Fahlen of Sweden states, "I'm joining this campaign to fight surrogacy to combat the exploitation of women all over the world. The ethical, medical and psychological consequences are far greater than thus far have been recognized."